Q&A: Flauntt.com Grows Your Content Readership Using Twitter

A4u caught up with SEO consultant, Sam Applegate, to chat about his new venture into the world of content marketing. The site, flauntt.com, acts as a mechanism for pushing your editorial out through Twitter to gain more hits. Enough from us, though, we’ll let our interviewee explain more.

What is Flauntt?

Flauntt.com is a free social promotion tool. It helps users get more people tweeting about their online content.

What was the inspiration behind the site?

SA: I recently setup an article writing company. We found that more and more clients were not only asking for great content, but also wanted their content socially pushed.

For a lot of SME’s, promoting their websites and blogs can be a real struggle.

Besides asking friends/colleagues to spread the word, they really didn’t have the time or money to promote the great content we were putting together for them.

Sure, great content does sell itself. But you’ve got to start somewhere.

So Flauntt.com is designed to help get the social-sharing-ball rolling.

How long did it take to develop?

SA: I’ve been very busy with my other commitments, so was only able to work part time on it. I would say about 4 weeks in total.

The design was the most frustrating aspect. I’m a coder by nature, so enjoyed putting together stuff under the bonnet. But the front end UI took a lot of tweaking.

When did you launch it?

SA: Well, I had planned on launching on 1st Jan 2013. However, I decided to upload it on 8th December 2012, to gain feedback and correct a few bugs.

The site needs members to operate, and I was unable to test everything without separate Twitter accounts hooked up.

The site is far from complete (my to-do list is growing every day).

How has it grown since being launched?

SA: Since I uploaded the site 3 days ago, it’s gained about 50 members, 60% of which have Tweeted or Flauntted (is that a word?) something.

How have you been promoting it?

SA: I didn’t want to spend much money on this idea, until I know it will take off. So I’ve been leveraging my existing twitter followers mainly, to help test the site.

But also, I’ve thrown some traffic at it through Google Adwords, Adcenter, StumbleUpon Paid Discovery and LinkedIn Ads.

Who is Flauntt.com aimed at?

SA: Primarily at the small or medium-sized company, blogger or website, that produces great content and wants to get the social sharing ball rolling. Those individuals that perhaps don’t have a huge social network, or struggle to get people sharing their stuff.

The bottom line here is that great content will indeed sell itself. People will naturally share great stuff with their followers. This tool just helps it get things started.

What this tool can’t do, is get people sharing poor quality stuff.

How are you planning on combating spam?

SA: Every new Flauntt that is submitted, is manually checked, and given a quality score.

We reward good stuff, by encouraging more tweets for it. Bad stuff will be either rejected, or given a very low score (encouraging less tweets).

See: http://www.flauntt.com/how-it-works/ for more details.

It sounds similar to other micro affiliate social sites like PeerIndex, Digital Animal's Fandistribution and Traffic Junction's Have You Seen. How do you intend to set it apart?

SA: Flauntt.com isn’t an affiliate site as such. There is no financial reward for tweeting. The reward you get is that other people will tweet your stuff in return.

There’s also a unique quality control system in place that I believe no other site has.

We score each Flauntt on how useful, valuable, detailed it is. In addition, if it’s advertorial it’ll get a lower score.

Stuff with a higher score, is promoted more than stuff with a lower score.

How will you be improving the site over time?

SA: As I mentioned, the to-do list is longer than my arm. I think understanding the concept is key, so I plan on getting a nice how-it-works video done.

Also, we need to better reward authors that consistently Flauntt good stuff.

But I don’t want to move too fast on this just yet. Only time will tell if it takes off.

What would you like to see flauntt.com become? What's the end game?

SA: The key to this model is having a lot of members, and a lot of content to choose from. Eventually, if all goes well, the site can be a kind of Digg.com with a difference.

Simon Holland

Simon is the news and research reporter at Existem. Previously a technology journalist, he now spends his time investigating both future and developing trends in performance marketing whilst producing editorial content for performancein.com.